Leon Kilat: The Tech Experiments

Rolling out my own “Friendster” service

When I found the link to Ning.com, I was intrigued. The company, co-founded by Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, bills itself as a “playground” for building social applications. I immediately applied for an account and requested for beta developer status.

Only beta developers can clone applications. It took me a few days to be given the beta developer account but when I got the e-mail yesterday, I immediately started playing with Ning.com’s services. The first application I cloned was for social networking ala Friendster or FaceBook.

I initially cloned the Bulldogster application to serve as the online storage of profiles of Bisaya Bloggers group members. But I found going through the codes and changing the fields tedious – I was really impatient, I went over the codes for less than five minutes and then gave up. I’d repeatedly miss references to pets or animals in several files. I found that after I’ve set things up – the profile editing field would ask members their breed or favorite park.

I decided to just clone the dating application. The service is now up, it’s at bisayabloggers.ning.com. I’m thinking of cloning the bookmarking application next.

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8 responses

  1. Mike Avatar
    Mike

    I think Ning looks really interesting. However, it seems that the cloning of the application has its limits. For example, you could probably clone del.icio.us pretty fast because it is very basic but what about http://www.blinklist.com? It is a new service that we just launched. If you can clone it in ning, let me know. I would love to see it. Mike

    Reply
  2. Max Avatar
    Max

    Mike,
    Blinklist blew me away. It’s really good. I just signed up. Thanks for the link. Now I have to set aside playing with Ning to focus on configuring my Blinklist account.

    Max

    Reply
  3. DJB Avatar
    DJB

    Hi there Leon! Thanks for the plug and the traffic today! You know I’ve been prowling around NING myself and been wondering about whether it would be worth doing an app. You? I noticed that their biggest app category is DECISION where you choose between two things (girls, beer, even yup, asses!) and the site gives you statistics. Have you figured out what NING might be good for here?
    dean

    Reply
  4. Max Avatar
    Max

    Hi sir,
    A lot of people have been cloning the Decision app, I thought of putting out sinoangmaspra.ning.com as contest for Pinoy politicians 🙂 . I think the profile matching app is the best one for me. I can’t clone the restaurant reviews with map because Google still doesn’t have a map for Cebu (I wonder if it has one for Manila) – I’m also not interested in cloning a Craigslist service.

    Max

    Reply
  5. Clair Avatar
    Clair

    I also stumbled upon Ning sometime last week. I had fun there =)

    Reply
  6. DJB Avatar
    DJB

    Hi Max. Sorry for calling you Leon earlier, but I guess we’ve never met except here. Wow, you’ve actually cloned a Ning app. I was looking over Bisayabloggers.ning.com. So it seems easy enough to do though “tedious” as you say.

    So is Ning just another blog publishing service? What do you think is significant about it. What could it be useful for or neat to do with it? What’s the “social” or “community” bit about, do you think?

    Could someone turn it into Debate On Line, or some kind of pollster like SWS?

    Reply
  7. Max Avatar
    Max

    It’s okay sir. Cloning apps is easy in Ning – I was really impatient when I cloned the social application for Bisaya Bloggers – I wanted things to be done in five minutes (it was nearly 6:00 a.m. and I had to sleep.) You can then customize the application by going through the code.

    Ning is a site that allows developers to play with code for social software for blogging, networking, tagging etc.

    I think an online debate application can easily be done by cloning either the discussion board app or storytelling app. I don’t know about polls, though. I haven’t spotted a survey application that can be cloned.

    Reply
  8. AYEZA Avatar
    AYEZA

    “….I decided to just clone the dating application. The service is now up, it’s at bisayabloggers.ning.com. I’m thinking of cloning the bookmarking application next…”

    Oh my i think i signed in at the wrong application. Di ko alam dating form pala yun hahahaha. On the second thought hmm malay natin magkakulay ang lablayp ko hahahaa

    Abangan!

    Reply

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